For example, in the manufacturing process of semiconductor devices to be incorporated in a mobile device, surface mount components are electrically connected on a ceramic substrate, and after the surface mount components are collectively sealed by sealing resin for the purpose of protection of the surface mount components, the height reduction, weight reduction and downsizing of modules, the substrate is divided into individual modules. The surface mount components are connected using a connecting material such as solder through the mounting of components such as a capacitor, a resistor, and a filter (passive components here), the face-up mounting, flip chip mounting, and ball grid array (BGA) mounting including a chip size package (CSP) of semiconductor elements.
In this process, as a method of dividing into individual modules, a method in which the division can be stably performed while preventing the exposure of the surface mount components, electric wires, and electrodes due to the dividing grooves formed on a ceramic substrate in advance, dividing grooves on a sealing resin formed by a dicing machine or a laser cutting machine, and mechanical load on the dividing grooves has been used in recent years.
On the other hand, since an expensive apparatus for forming the dividing grooves on the sealing resin is additionally required in this dividing method, a simpler dividing technology has become necessary from the viewpoint of cost reduction. Therefore, a technology in which the division can be stably performed with high positional accuracy while preventing the exposure of the surface mount components mounted around the dividing grooves due to the shape of the dividing grooves formed on the ceramic substrate and the mechanical load, without additionally providing the expensive apparatus for forming the dividing grooves on the sealing resin, has been required.
For example, according to the description of Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-110083 (Patent Document 1), the collective sealing using soft sealing resin such as silicone resin is performed, and only a sealing resin portion is cut along a partition line in advance. By this means, division of a multiple piece substrate after the collective sealing can be easily performed.
Also, according to the description of Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 11-31704 (Patent Document 2), V-shaped dividing grooves formed by a cutter on both sides of a base substrate such as glass epoxy or alumina are provided in advance, depth dimensions of the dividing grooves are set to about ⅓ of the base substrate, the depth of the dividing grooves formed on the sealing resin of the base substrate is designed to be approximately equal to a thickness of the sealing resin, and epoxy resin is used as the sealing resin. By this means, a semiconductor device in which a surface of the sealing resin is flat can be easily manufactured at low cost.